Computerized firearms: Holder's bad gun idea

The Obama administration's ongoing effort to place unnecessary restraints on our right to bear arms entered a strange phase when Attorney General Eric Holder floated the idea of requiring that guns be manufactured so that only the lawful owners could use them. It is a dumb idea.

Before a U.S. House Appropriations subcommittee on April 4, Holder said: "I think that one of the things that we learned when we were trying to get passed those common-sense reforms last year, Vice President Biden and I had a meeting with a group of technology people, and we talked about how guns can be made more safe. By making them either through fingerprint identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon."

Requiring manufacturers to include single-user restrictions in every handgun renders the weapons useless for anyone else who might need them for protection. Gun-owning families often have one gun in the home, to be used by whichever adult might need it in an emergency.

Holder would require every adult to have his or her own gun, a needless expense.

Despite what he might have seen in the movies, the technology for this is not yet perfected. And making handguns more complex raises their cost and their risk of malfunction. Gun ownership is a constitutional right. Is Holder prepared to price that right out of reach of the poor (who need it the most)?

Furthermore, gun deaths in America are not caused by guns being manufactured incorrectly. They result primarily from suicides (more than 60 percent of all gun deaths), cultural factors and some laws (for instance, drug prohibition, which creates inner city drug gangs and their turf wars) that Holder's gun ID plan would do little or nothing to combat.